Question Can't get into BIOS

[7beauties]

Friends, I installed a used Western Digital HDD in my rig to access an important document. Device Manager sees it, and so does Speecy, both stating that the drive is good, but Windows>This PC doesn't list it. I thought that I should enter BIOS and make that WD HDD active but I can't access BIOS. I have an Asus ROG Crosshair VI Hero motherboard and I've tried restarting my rig holding down either the F2 or Delete keys but the darn thing never enters BIOS (the Asus splash screen tells you to choose either F2 or Delete to enter BIOS). I'm no expert in Windows 10 and maybe there's something I don't know that will help. I would appreciate any advice. Thank you.

 

[Kenmitch]

If the keyboard is USB you could try another port? Rapidly tapping the F2 or delete key is usually how it's done.

Can you see the drive in Disk management?

 

[7beauties]

If the keyboard is USB you could try another port? Rapidly tapping the F2 or delete key is usually how it's done.

Can you see the drive in Disk management?

Device Manager shows that I have that HDD and that it's working properly. I began mashing the Delete key to get into BIOS and then mashing the F2 keys, but no cigar. So then I held down those respective keys while restarting, but no cigar. I'll do as you suggest and try moving my keyboard's USB plug into another USB jack. And all this because I added that WD HDD. Sometimes changing or adding hardware will change the computer's behavior. Thank you for your reply.

 

[mikeymikec]

Windows Disk Management should give a bit more useful information about what's going on with that drive, though it's a bit odd that if it's a used drive (ie. one you've used before?) then I'd expect it to have at least one usable partition set up already. However, if you bought it as used and haven't used it yourself yet, the seller probably nuked all the existing partitions from the drive before they sent it to you.

 

[7beauties]

Windows Disk Management should give a bit more useful information about what's going on with that drive, though it's a bit odd that if it's a used drive (ie. one you've used before?) then I'd expect it to have at least one usable partition set up already. However, if you bought it as used and haven't used it yourself yet, the seller probably nuked all the existing partitions from the drive before they sent it to you.

mikeymikec, that HDD belongs to someone in my family and there's important documentation on it he needs to recover. The reason his HDD is out of its case is that his PC failed. I'm beginning to suspect that the drive itself may have failed though Device Manager and Speecy say it's working. I'm grateful for your reply. Thank you.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Go to Disk Management, see if it has partition(s), and make sure that they're not showing as "RAW".

You might just need to "import" it (if Dynamic Disk), or assign a drive letter to the partition ("Volume").

 

[Kenmitch]

mikeymikec, that HDD belongs to someone in my family and there's important documentation on it he needs to recover. The reason his HDD is out of its case is that his PC failed. I'm beginning to suspect that the drive itself may have failed though Device Manager and Speecy say it's working. I'm grateful for your reply. Thank you.

Can you see the HDD in disk management?

You could take a look at this and see if it points you in the correct direction. Of course you'll want to be careful and not do anything that will get rid of data.

What to Do When Your External Hard Drive Won't Show Up | PCMag

 

[mikeymikec]

Ok, so potentially failing disk, it ought to be at least showing a partition structure and presumably Windows-compatible file systems, so those drives should already be showing up in 'This PC' (even if Windows says they're not formatted), but they're not.

Therefore, the drive is far gone enough that it's not reporting partition data.

I bet that Windows Disk Management will hang / wait forever on connecting to the Virtual Disk Service. OP needs to use data recovery software or better still find someone who's done this before. If the disk is failing, it's no time to faff around rebooting / power cycling the disk. Time is of the essence.

OP, you should have led with the fact that the disk is suspected to be failing, because it's a completely different ball game to play than "this presumably healthy disk ought to be working but I can't see anything in 'This PC'".

 

[moinmoin]

If the disk is failing be sure to power it on and access it as little as possible so only when absolutely necessary. Every further lifetime used, any active read and especially write accesses, increase the possibility that data can't be recovered anymore at all. So stop anything you are doing with it right now before you got a clue how to proceed.

I personally had very good experience with using dd_rescue in Linux live systems to successfully make identical copies of failing disks to working disks (which has to be completely empty and naturally needs to be at least equal the size). Depending on the state of the failing disk this can still allows recovering most of the data, though very big files are likely to contain garbage data in random parts as a result.